This world is suited to human enjoyment

In extremely elegant detail

Winter clarifies strange joys and brings them into focus. For instance:

• The widening, almost frightened eyes of the 3-year-old when the diner waitress sets a huge pancake down in front of him

• The delivery of nearly every line by David Puddy

• The willingness, in the spirit, to commit to a Norwegian novel that appears to be just one long sentence

• The look crossing the face of the 5-year-old as he reads, recalling his pre-verbal self, a sweet vestige of that long-gone baby, stinging with a heart-clutching recognition

• The pair of hawks, alighting on a small dogwood tree in front of us, stoic and unmoved by our presence, turning their severe heads with slow intention

• The thrilling flicker of red taper candles at every meal, and the nightly threat that one of the children will set his hair or sleeve on fire

• The scent of the husband’s neck in the morning, when he sits down to try to eat breakfast before being asked for something by a small boy

• The self-satisfied 10-month-old repeatedly exclaiming her first word, bell, by which she means any overhead light, confused by our belief that she was enchanted by the sound of the bells on her grandmother’s Christmas tree and not, instead, by the sight of its many twinkling lights

All of this, and more, becomes clear in this magical week between Christmas and New Year’s. I feel as if my brain has been wiped clean. Over the Christmas week, we were stuffed with food and family conversation, joyfully passing days together that waffled between chaos and contemplation.

Aforementioned hawk pair, glimpsed in Davidson

We came home to a very sad Christmas tree (“Mommy, the tree is slowly falling down,” Felix described it this morning) and a not-clean house and a strangely wet climate. We came home to old routines and old household ways—and yet felt ourselves subtly changed.

I have that irresistible oldest-daughter impulse to write down a list of practical goals for the year ahead, as if I would remember them in a week, as if I would make any substantive change in my life to achieve them.

Instead, I realize that what I want to do I am already doing.

This is not to say that I am ready to be your life coach or that I have achieved some domestic nirvana. Rather, I acknowledge that I want to stay the course. Keep committing and recommitting to all of the people and practices in my life. Keep trying to raise decent human beings. Keep cherishing my spouse. Keep walking and reading and writing and gardening and home-making. Keep holding a prayer in my mouth.

More in 2025 goals: Keep scavenging for free books whilst baby-wearing!

---

And now a reminder from Mother Marilynne:

“This world is suited to human enjoyment—‘out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight’—in anticipation of human pleasure, which the Lord presumably shares. This is an extremely elegant detail. The beauty of the trees is noted before the fact that they yield food. It is a rich goodness that the Lord intended and created for our experience. Two things are signified, that God as the creator of beauty intends it for us to see and enjoy, and that He gives us the gifts of apprehension this pleasure requires, which is nothing less than a sharing of His mind with us in this important particular. That God Himself in some celestial sense has and enjoys this kind of perception gives us an insight into the meaning of our being made in His image. The world is imbued with these reminders that there is a beautiful intention and assurance expressed in every perception we have of loveliness in the natural world.”

— Reading Genesis, Marilynne Robinson

---

Currently reading

• The Last Supper, Rachel Cusk

• The Other Name: Septology I-II, Jon Fosse

• New Collected Poems, Wendell Berry